


A Fire Before

by LinearA



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M, Force-Sensitive Finn, I just want Finn and Rose to be happy okay, In Memory of Carrie Fisher, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, z"l
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-26 04:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20383465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: Rose hasn't told Finn she's pregnant.  Now he's gone, and Poe is gone, and Rey is gone, and something may have gone very, very wrong in their fight against the First Order.





	A Fire Before

Nobody knows but the two of them. Rose and the general. Rey would know if she were here, the general says, and of course she’d tell Finn if he were here.

Of course she would.

She talks to it, when there’s no one around. “Hang in there, kiddo,” she says, as she climbs hand over hand into the guts of the cruiser, hundreds of meters to fall below her. “I won’t look down if you won’t.”

“Isn’t that something?” she murmurs on her morning walk, looking out at the orange sun rising in the pink sky. She takes morning walks now; she hasn’t been sick so far, but if she’s going to be, she wants it to be out in the grass, alone.

“It’ll never happen,” she assures the tiny second heartbeat, when the group of bounty hunters have passed her hiding place. “Aunt Rey would never let them hurt him. Bounty hunters are nothing; she fought Kylo Ren all alone on an exploding base just to keep him safe. When you’re born, they’ll tell you all about it.”

“It’s okay,” she says in the ‘fresher, after the briefing. “Even if he doesn’t have Aunt Rey right now, he still has Uncle Poe. He’ll be fine. And when Aunt Rey gets back it will all be better.”

“You heard him,” she whispers, when the last blue light on the terminal goes dark and Finn’s image is gone without a trace. “Don’t worry. He’ll be fine; he’ll come back, and he’ll be fine. I’ll tell him about you and he’ll be happy. So don’t worry.” 

And on another morning walk, when the clouds are such brilliant colors she wonders if she’s hallucinating, or if she died in last night’s attack and the Force has brought her spirit to some better, brighter galaxy, she explains, “Atmospheric scattering. That’s what makes the colors. There are little particles very high in the atmosphere, and the light strikes them, and,” and then she kneels down and vomits. She thinks she’s done but then it starts again, and she doesn’t know if she should blame pregnancy or the shock of survival or the knowledge that the atmosphere is filled with particulate remains of ships and their pilots.

She doesn’t talk to anybody all day after that. And that night, she doesn’t want to talk to the being inside her who siphons off her rations to feed itself and floods her bloodstream with hormones, and who is slowly rearranging her internal organs for its own comfort. She wants to talk to Rey, because what if Finn doesn’t want it? She wants to go to the general and ask if it’s always like this, if being so afraid is just another hormonal reaction she should soldier through, like nausea. She wants to talk to Finn, and tell him she’s pregnant, and ask if he still loves her, and if he’ll love her baby. She wants to put her head in Paige’s lap and cry and cry and cry.

But Rey and Finn are across the galaxy, unreachable as they should be on secret missions, and Paige is dead. So she wipes her face and stares at her lips in a reflective panel until they stop shaking, and leaves her quarters to see if she can find the general.

_She’s probably busy, or sleeping,_ Rose tells herself. _She the general, and she’s old. I should find a med droid instead._ But she knows she won’t, because a med droid could answer her question but a med droid can’t give her what she needs, because no med droid has ever given birth the awful, stupid, scary old human way.

The general is awake, alone, and sitting still. As she walks towards her, Rose’s heart rises a little. _She knows what it’s like. She must have been afraid. That war was just as bad as this one. And her child’s father was Han Solo._ For an instant she takes guilty pleasure in weighing Finn’s few odd transgressions (he _did_ try to desert) against General Solo’s reported lifelong piracy habit. Then she sees the general’s face.

Her voice wavers. “General Organa?”

“Rose.” The general’s voice is hoarse; her eyes are desolate. She takes a deep breath, but she only lets it out again, sighing, “Rose.” She holds out a shaking hand, and Rose rushes to take it.

“What’s wrong? Is there a dispatch?”

“Not a conventional message.” General Organa closes her eyes and her grip on Rose’s hand is tight. “I wish it had been. I have some sense of when to trust a message. I had a… vision. In the Force.”

“It was bad?” Rose’s mind races. She imagines copies of all their data chips held in a black-gloved hand, a sky swarming with First Order destroyers, Rey sliced by a burning red beam, Finn struck by a vibro-blade, Finn riddled with blaster fire, Finn blown out of the sky, Finn — “Finn?”

The general shakes her head, and squeezes Rose’s hand. “No. As far as I know, your young man is still alive, off being brave and _hopefully_ not too foolish somewhere.”

Rose calms down a little. She wonders, for a moment, if the other heartbeat, the one that needs her, speeds and slows with hers. If the dread that fills her veins is poisoning her child. Because the general doesn’t look so stricken for no reason. “What did you see?”

The general closes her eyes. “Rey.” Rose’s heart sinks. “Not dead, but… ”

“Hurt?”

“Turned to the Dark Side. Far gone.” Rose gasps, and General Organa draws her cloak tight around her. “If she were hurt, she could be healed. Even if she were dead, she wouldn’t — ” She bites her lip, and Rose sees the cold strategist in her. This woman has ordered strikes on her own son, because her son, fallen to the Dark, is the foremost source of danger to their cause. In a calculation like that, Rey is better dead than turned against them.

Rose has known, abstractly, that their missions against Kylo Ren must hurt the general, but the reality of that pain has never come home to her before now, when she imagines Rey as their enemy. Their target. And worse, it must be worse, because Rey is Rose’s friend but if she were her child — she can’t bear to think how much every second of this war must hurt Leia Organa, and she desperately seizes on her earlier words. “But maybe it’s not true. You said you didn’t trust it. Maybe it’s a trick.”

General Organa sighs. “It might be. Perhaps my son has finally managed to learn some measure of subtlety. But frankly, I doubt it. And it doesn’t _feel_ like a message from him.”

“Who does it feel like, then? Does the Force send visions like that, just out of nowhere?”

“Sometimes. Visions of the past, or the present, or the future. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually specify which.”

“So you can’t trust it because it might be a vision of the future? And of course if it’s the future we can change it.”

To her surprise, the general smiles at that, and lifts her hand to cup Rose’s cheek. “I’m so glad to have you with me, Rose. To tell me _of course_ the future can be changed.”

“Well, it can,” Rose says. “And it can’t be the present, can it? If someone as powerful as Rey had gone to the Dark, wouldn’t you have felt it?”

“I like to think so. I’m afraid I’m not powerful enough, not knowledgeable enough to know that for sure.” General Organa closes her hands over her walking stick. “I’m afraid I always assumed that I would have my brother here to… know it for me.”

Impulsively, Rose puts her hand over the general’s, and makes her grip and her voice firm. “If it’s the future, it could be changed. If it’s the present, and you didn’t feel it in the Force, maybe something happened to balance it out. Maybe — ” She swallows. “Maybe Kylo Ren came back to the Light.”

“Perhaps,” the general says sadly. “Perhaps. Through the Force all things are possible.”

In the silent moment that follows, Rose makes a mental list of things she’d like the Force to take care of, if that’s true.

She’s finished with the obvious (the war, everybody safe and well and happy) and moved onto some creature comforts she wouldn’t mind (can the Force arrange a different mattress for her? please?) when the general asks, “What was it you wanted, when you came looking for me?”

“Oh. I.” _I wanted to ask you if it was normal to be terrified all the time when you were pregnant so you would tell me yes, it was just hormones, no actual reason to be really afraid, and I could just blame the baby for how scared I am._ “Nothing important. Just, you know… pregnant. Looking for sympathy.”

General Organa smiles. “You have _all_ my sympathy. But you should go to bed before I talk your ear off about the particular miseries of carrying a Force-sensitive child.”

Rose would like to hear that, actually, but she knows a hint when she hears one. 

When she goes to bed, on her uncomfortable mattress, she dreams that Rey wears a dark hood and a pitiless look as she stalks towards her. “I’m not here for you,” she tells Rose as Rose scrambles backwards. “I’m here for her.”

“You can’t have her,” Rose replies. “If you want a baby, go fall in love with Kylo Ren or something and make your own evil baby. Go try and oppress the galaxy when your breasts hurt and you’re tired all the time and you have to pee every five minutes.”

“Do not mock me,” Rey snarls, igniting a crackling red blade, and then another. “Ben Solo is dead. I killed him myself. He was too weak for the Dark. Too weak for his own weapon.” In the dream, Rose can see into the heart of the saber, where a cracked crystal shrieks and burns.

“His mother will cry for him,” Rose says. 

“I have no mother to cry for me.”

“Neither do I. I’ve cried for my parents and I’ve cried for my sister and I’ll cry for you but I won’t let you make me cry for my baby.”

“You think you can keep me from her?”

“I’m not alone.” And she's not; Leia Organa's hands are on her shoulders and Rey's eyes go wide as a tall man in a dark hood puts a steady blue blade across her unstable red one. Then she laughs.

_"You think the dead can stop me?"_

Rose wakes up. She's flat on her back, staring up at the low ceiling of her bunk, roaring in her ears. She draws a shaky breath and puts her hand on her stomach. Leia's not dead. Rose isn't sensitive to the Force. _(But maybe Rey's mother wasn't either.)_ Probably this is just Rose being afraid, like always; she should just soldier through it. And even if she _is_ having a Force-sensitive baby, visions probably aren't transmittable through the uterine wall. But still. She tries to make soothing circles with her hand. "Don't worry," she whispers. "I know you're scared. I’m scared too. But we can always change it."

She keeps breakfast down, and spends her morning walk explaining what she remembers about the lifecycle of grasses. When she returns to base, Kaydel is yelling her name. Rose breaks into a run, but Kaydel smiles when she sees her, bright and unworried. “We’ve got Finn on the comm! He says he wants to talk to you. In _private.”_

With a smirk, she leaves Rose alone with the comm. There’s Finn, glowing blue and smiling. But he looks worried; she can tell, even as he fuzzes in and out of clarity, that he’s worried. She smiles as brightly as she can for him, and opens her mouth to ask him if he’s okay, when he blurts out, “Rose, are you pregnant?”

She stares. How can he possibly know? He shifts, scratching the back of his neck and continues, “I know that’s crazy, because you’d tell me, right? If you were. It’s just, I had this dream last night? Where Rey told me you were pregnant and I had to be careful.”

“How did she seem?”

Finn’s taken aback. “What, Rey? She seemed, uh. Happy?”

Rose doesn’t know who’s sending who visions how, she’s just so glad to hear about Rey being _Rey_ that she slumps. _We can always change the future._ When she looks up, Finn is staring at her.

“Yes,” she says, and she can feel her eyes filling with tears. “Yes, I’m pregnant. I didn’t — I would have told you but I was afraid — ”

“You’re really pregnant?” The angle of his image changes abruptly; he’s jumped up and leaned over the projector that’s showing him her image. “Really? Rose — that’s — that’s — ” His hands fly to his hair and Rose can’t stop crying, she’s so afraid; _what if he’s angry, what if he doesn’t want it?_ “Rose, that’s so — beautiful.”

The comm is low-res but he’s leaned his head against the projector, close to the data aperture, and she can see the tears in his eyes, too, and her smile fights its way back to her face. She reaches up and out to the aperture on her end, rising on her toes so he’ll see how much she wants to hug him. How she’d reach across the lightyears if she could.

“I’ll come back,” Finn vows, his forehead creasing, and he’s so handsome and she loves him so much and their baby is going to be the best and most special baby in the world. “I’ll come back right now.”

“I want to see you,” Rose says. “I want to see you so much. But you have to finish your mission. It’s good luck, anyway. For a baby’s parents to fight for the galaxy.”

Finn’s frown deepens. “That’s not a real superstition. You made that up.”

“I made it up but it’s real.” He’s still frowning. “If you finish your mission, it will be _such_ good luck for our baby, won’t it?”

“But Rose — ”

“I need you, Finn. And I love you so much. But we all need you.”

“Rose,” he says. His mouth is so close to the aperture she almost thinks she could kiss him. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone,” she says. Tears are still running down her cheeks. “I’m not alone. And neither are you. And neither is Rey. You have to tell her, Finn, if you see her. In real life or in a dream or anything. You have to tell her — ” _Tell her she’s not alone. Tell her we’d cry for her, if she were lost. Tell her Leia Organa can’t afford to have mercy on her son, so she has to. Tell her to remember the Light and believe in the Light._ “Tell her not to be afraid. We love her. Me and the baby.”

“I will. But, Rose — Rose, you’re pregnant. I have to _do_ something. I can’t just — ”

“Stay safe. Finish your mission and come home safe.”

“But I mean I have to do something for _you. We’re going to have a baby.”_ He sounds so pleased and so urgent. Rose laughs, weeping, and Finn makes a noise of frustration. “Tell me a _real_ superstition, at least,” he says, stubborn. “If I can’t do anything else.”

Rose thinks. What’s a “real” superstition? Just something harmless, to make you less afraid. To make you feel loved. She touches the pendant at her throat. “If you see a fire,” she says, “blow on it. Just to make it burn a little brighter.”

“I will. We’ll have a campfire tonight, and I’ll make sure to blow on it.”

“I’ll light one too,” she says. “So we can be doing the same thing, even though we’re apart.”

He nods, serious. “We have to do everything we can to take care our baby.”

That night, true to her word, Rose walks out of the base into dark. She scrapes out a little pit in the dirt, and kneels to light a bit of scrap on fire. She bends down, and blows on it. The flames flare up. Rose sits back on her heels, and imagines her the little spark inside her. Imagines it growing into a woman with black hair that curls and a bright blue lightsaber in her hand.

“May I join you?” a voice says, and Rose jumps up. General Organa smiles. “Usually, sneaking off base to light fires is frowned upon, but I knew it was you. Would you rather I left you alone?”

“Of course you can stay if you want to, General! There’s nowhere really to sit, though?”

“Well, it’s a small fire. I don’t mind standing watch until it burns down.”

Rose doesn’t say anything. She hadn’t thought of that, when she lit it, that she’d have to watch it end. She pictures Finn, on another world, blowing on the embers of a dying fire, trying to coax out another spark for the sake of their child. She shouldn’t have told him to do this; she should have told him to come home; she misses him so much — Rose _can’t_ be crying again; she’s going to get dehydrated — but she can’t stop — 

The general’s hands settle on her shoulders and she jumps. But she’s real, and alive, and smiling in the firelight. “Don’t worry,” she says kindly, and waves her hand above her head, where a million stars glow in the darkness. “I’ve watched so many lights go out, Rose. They all do, in the end. But there’s always another light, and another. There are lights all around us. And they’re all worth watching, while they last.”

And Rose should look up at the night sky, at all the beautiful lights worth watching, but instead she folds, sobbing, onto the general’s shoulder. Because she cares about the stars, really she does, but — “I just want him to come back. I just want him to come back and see our baby.”

“He will,” Leia says, and Rose knows she can’t know that, not for sure, because the future can always be changed, but Leia’s hand strokes her hair, and when she says it again, “He will,” Rose lets herself believe it, and lets her eyes dry as she watches the bright embers drift across the night.

**Author's Note:**

> I have never been pregnant myself; please forgive me if that is glaringly apparent.
> 
> The title comes from a European folk belief that a fire beside a woman giving birth will ward off evil. In Child Ballad 103, a girl called Rose the Red, going into labor, asks a knight for a fire behind her, a fire before her, a midwife beside her, and a horn to call for her child's father.
> 
> "Remember the light and believe in the light" is a quotation from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I believe, but I know it from Sarah Kane's play 4:48 Psychosis.


End file.
